The Taliban Were Dead But Have Returned Under Obama

Afghanistan: Proxy negotiations with the Taliban have collapsed. Naturally, since these sadistic Islamofascists are just waiting for America to leave. Behold another Obama foreign-policy disaster.

babfThe headline in the New York Times reads "U.S. Abandoning Hopes For Taliban Peace Deal." That is surreal. The Taliban was defeated in mere weeks after 9/11. How can this be happening when in 2008 candidate Obama was promising to reallocate resources away from George W. Bush's "dumb war" in Iraq to the "smart war" in Afghanistan?

It turns out in his first term Obama has lost both.

How can it be when Obama approved his own "surge" of troops in Afghanistan?

Because its 33,000 troops fell well short of what was needed, and because last year and this year Obama ordered out tens of thousands of troops in a rapid drawdown that undid his surge's inadequate gains.

It is set in stone that America will leave Afghanistan in 2014. No wonder the Times reports that "military and diplomatic officials" in Kabul "and in Washington said that despite attempts to engage directly with Taliban leaders this year, they now expect that any significant progress will come only after 2014, once the bulk of NATO troops have left."

The 2014 deadline amounts to "voluntarily ceding the prize the Taliban has been seeking for over a decade," the Times says, citing Obama critics.

The president proposed a prisoner swap of five Taliban leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an American hostage.

But the Taliban is not interested in even something as one-sided as that. Why should it when it can wait, then fight its way back into power?

To underline the absurdity of it all, one of the members of the Karzai government's "High Peace Council," designed to coax the Taliban into making nice, is Mualavi Qalamuddin, the former head of the Taliban's bloodthirsty Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

We are losing our decade-long war in the birthplace of al-Qaida, a reality that could send the world's lone superpower into a steep decline.

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